In 1960, the people of California passed a bond issue to build facilities that would allow the movement of water from where it falls (75% of California’s rain and snow fall north of Sacramento) to where the people live (75% of its population lives south of the Tehachapi mountains). Included in the California State Water Project were facilities to be built over many years, including dams on the Feather River, a tributary to the Sacramento, and on the rivers of California's north coast, a way to move water through or around the San Francisco Bay Delta, an aqueduct and pumping stations to take the water to the San Joaquin Valley and the southland, and various storage facilities. The state Department of Water Resources (DWR) built, operates, and maintains the State Water Project (SWP) on behalf of the people of California. As of now (2007) the facilities constructed can reliably deliver less than half of the water originally promised.

Contracts
When the SWP bonds passed, water purveyors throughout the state signed contracts for the delivery of water totaling 4.23 million acre feet a year (mafy), a number that the state believed could be delivered at full build-out of the facilities. All of the contractors are public entities. The largest is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWDSC), which contracted for 48% of the water; the second largest is the Kern County Water Agency, which contracted for 27% of the water. Together they account for three-fourths of the SWP’s contractual capacity. Each contractor agreed to pay for its percentage share of all the facilities needed to deliver their contracted amount.

Also included in the contracts between the water agencies and the state Department of Water Resources (DWR) is Article 18, which acknowledges that the state cannot immediately, nor necessarily ever, deliver the entire 4.23 mafy. Under Article 18(a), agricultural users would be reduced first in times of drought.  This so-called "urban preference" mirrors many other provisions of California law, including California Water Code Section 106, which provides that domestic water use has priority over agricultural production. It is easier to fallow land than to cut water to homes and industries.

Article 18(b) directs DWR to reduce all entitlements (contracted amounts) proportionally if it is determined that there is a permanent reduction in the minimum yield of the project. This is significant because only a portion of the project components have been built; there is growing consensus that for economic, political, and environmental reasons, the SWP will never be fully built out.  Among other things, the north coast rivers have now been declared "wild and scenic," and various environmental laws require that more water be left instream to protect threatened and endangered species. A peripheral canal to take Sacramento River water around the delta to the pumps was defeated at the polls in 1982 and is politically dead because of growing environmental concerns, although this idea is once again under consideration as a way to deal with the severe environmental problems in the delta.

Demand for Water
Once some of the initial facilities were built and water was being delivered to southern California, most water agencies could not use all the water they contracted for.  So, for a time, there was “surplus” water in the system. The Director of DWR declared a surplus in the San Francisco Bay Delta, and made that water available to any water agency, for just the cost of the energy needed to move it. The costs of the conveyance facilities were already covered in the contracts.

Agricultural agencies were the primary recipients of this “surplus” water at a greatly reduced price. All of this changed in the late 1980s when a period of drought coincided with population growth in the Southland. In 1991, the state could not deliver the amount of water requested, and DWR invoked Article 18(a), delivering no water to agricultural users that year and only 12% of normal supply to urban users.

Environment and Water
What began as a project to better utilize the resources of the state, taking water from where it fell in the north to where it could be used in the south, became an environmental nightmare.

As much as 70% of the water that normally would flow through and out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay was diverted, either before the water got to the Delta or directly from the Delta, to serve both agricultural and urban needs.  The state and federal water projects operate by pumping water out of the south end of the Delta, causing natural flows to reverse themselves, endangering endemic fish species and confusing migrating salmon searching for their ancestral spawning grounds.

The Peripheral Canal
In the mid 1960s, DWR and the Legislature proposed a Peripheral Canal around the Delta to increase flow to the south. California voters, realizing that such a canal would further damage the environment, defeated the canal referendum in 1982.  Now, more than twenty-five years later, a version of the canal is again under serious consideration, being pushed by some water users as the answer to the Delta's woes.  Many in the environmental community remain deeply skeptical that any canal could be built and operated in an environmentally sensitive manner.

CALFED

CALFED is composed of a consortium of state and federal agencies with responsibility in the Delta, representatives of urban and rural water districts, and representatives of the environmental community. Representatives from these three interest groups met in an effort to overcome the longstanding gridlock.  They attempted to design a solution to the problems in the Delta that would provide a reliable supply of good quality water to water contractors, would fix the levees, and would restore the environment. Finally, after years of debate, in an open process, CALFED came up with a plan that acknowledged the interrelationship of all these issues. It was agreed that water use efficiency programs should be implemented first before seeking any additional dams for storage. However, implementing this agreement, known as the Record of Decision (ROD), has proven difficult. The big water purveyors agreed that the beneficiaries should pay, yet have sought ways to get both state and federal funds to pay for more dams.  Moreover, other agreements, entered into by water users have undermined the intentions of the ROD. (See Monterey Agreement and Napa Proposition papers, discussed below.)

Current Issues:
Water availability remains critical as population and economic growth persists. Some of the current issues raised with regard to the State Water Project are:

1. SWP Reliability-- Past experience, the threat of global climate change, and prudent science demonstrate that less than 50% of the 4.23 mafy entitlements originally contracted is now available as a firm yield. The average SWP delivery during 1991-2001 was 1.86 mafy.  Yet, DWR uses a computer model called CALSIM II,a model that has been roundly criticized by a peer review, to project higher delivery capacity than is reasonable.

2. “Paper Water”-- Local governments responsible for permitting new growth must know whether sufficient water is available to sustain new urban development. Although the original “firm yield” of water from the State Water Project is unrealistic, water purveyors and developers rely on the inflated numbers from DWR's reliability reports in public legal documents such as Environmental Impact Reports on proposed new developments and in Urban Water Management Plans (UWMPs).

3. Privatization of Water-- As the competition for water increases, there is more pressure from business interests to treat water as a commodity. They want to use the marketplace to determine where this limited resource should go, so that they can profit from selling it. Public water agencies are speculatively selling water, often “paper water,” to quasi-public entities, which in turn can sell to others for profit.



4. Water Laundering and Transfers-- Water transfers can benefit the public if and only if (a) the water being transferred is real water and not “paper water,” and (b) DWR fulfills its duty to ensure the transfer is in the public interest and does not benefit any special interest at public expense. However, some water purveyors want to avoid public scrutiny and accountability by transferring and storing water of differing origins through complicated and seemingly impenetrable contracts, in effect “laundering” the water.

5. Monterey Agreement and Kern Fan Element-- In 1994, five of the 29 SWP contractors met in secret in Monterey and agreed to amend certain parts of the SWP contracts. Monterey Amendments to the SWP. These amendments, known as the "Monterey Amendments," deleted Article 18 from the SWP contracts, eliminating both the "urban preference" and the provision that would have required DWR to reduce the stated yield of the project to reflect reality.  The Agreement also permitted the transfer of a 20,000-acre State owned property known as the Kern Fan Element, an underground water storage facility, to the Kern County Water Agency for no remuneration.   The Planning and Conservation League, along with two other plaintiff groups, successfully challenging the environmental documentation for the Monterey Agreement in court. A California Appeals Court found in favor of the plaintiffs, a decision that was affirmed by the California Supreme Court. DWR was ordered to analyze the environmental impacts of the Monterey Amendments again, allowing for the first time, open public participation.

6. The Colorado River-- The Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California has depended on “surplus” water from the Colorado River for many years. MWD became dependent upon the regular receipt of approximately 800,000 afy of formerly unused allocation from Nevada and Arizona, so called "surplus" water. Both of these states have grown, and now demand their full allotments.  So, there is no longer any “surplus.” In 2003 the federal government stepped in and declared that MWD had 15 years to find other sources of water. MWD is offering incentives to its member agencies to encourage onservation and reclamation and reuse of wastewater. MWD is also promoting the conjunctive use of water, including storing rain when it falls in the winter and summer against use in the summer and fall, and putting wet year surpluses underground against dry year need. MWD is also encouraging watershed management. However, MWD is still looking to northern California to make up some of this loss.

Role of the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN)

The California Water Impact Network is a nonprofit corporation created in 2001 to promote equitable and environmentally sensitive uses of California’s water, including instream uses, through research, advocacy, public education and litigation. C-WIN is currently involved in a number of legal cases aimed at protecting the public’s interest in our water. C-WIN is developing a campaign to educate the people of California about the consequences of current state policies and the need for a comprehensive and integrated water policy that will meet the needs of all Californians, including restoring our decimated rivers and estuaries. There is enough water in the state. We can have it all by managing what we have much more efficiently, by implementing our Principles for a Sustainable Water Future.